Lutgens now enjoys tasks he never imagined doing
OUT AND ABOUT — Eli Lutgens before a recent meeting of the New Richland City Council. (Star Eagle photo by Deb Bently)
By DEB BENTLY
Contributing Writer
If the NRHEG community is a network, Eli Lutgens has become the microprocessor which accepts the input and generates reports—except for one important detail. Microprocessors don’t have hearts.
“Where I can, I like to help out,” says the 2016 NRHEG graduate. “In communities like ours, getting people’s stories told is the first step to finding a solution. People step forward and do what they can.” He mentions one recent terrifying heart attack which came to an uplifting conclusion. “In other towns,” he says, “your neighbor doesn’t respond to a 911 call and save your life.”
At 23, Lutgens has been the managing editor at the Star Eagle for three years, having taken on the duties from his father. As has been mentioned in recent issues, he has now purchased the newspaper and pictures himself continuing—and perhaps growing—the business for decades to come.
While it’s been short in years, though, the path to this moment has been winding and uncertain. “I always told myself I wouldn’t take over from my father,” he says. “I loved the line of work, but didn’t think I could work at the Star Eagle.”
It’s possible the problem was one of perspective. “This was our daycare,” he says of the publication’s office, speaking of himself and his sister, Jessica. “We used to play video games in the back corner. We would come in on summer days and ride our skateboards in the back room, when it used to have a concrete floor. We would watch T.V. and wait while our dad checked ‘just a few more’ things on his computer.”
But in the summer after Lutgens’ sophomore year of high school, he wanted some spending money and recognized that, to get it, he would need a job. He began by taking care of some of the boring but essential tasks of recordkeeping, then moved on to other fundamentals, including typing people’s handwritten notes and requests into digital documents.
“It astounds me, thinking back, how much I learned while I was doing those simple jobs,” he recalls. “It really laid the foundation for everything that came afterward.” Still, Lutgens did not picture himself as a permanent fixture at the Star Eagle. Time passed, he graduated high school and began attending college with an eye on a future elsewhere.
Then a day came in 2018 when his father’s health threatened to close the paper’s doors unless someone could be found—quickly—to put out the next edition.
“I waited until everyone else had left, and I sat down in the editor’s chair,” he remembers. “I just started punching buttons and trying things until I figured out all the controls.” Lutgens spent about 40 hours at the keyboard that evening and over the weekend until, by Monday morning, he had pieced together a finished, or at least nearly finished, product.
He was in the chair again early Monday when other newspaper workers arrived. “Reed (Waller) looked at what I had done, then he looked at me,” says Lutgens. Then, after a moment, “‘Wow,’ he said. ‘You’ve done everything wrong…
But now we’ve got something to work with.’”
Lutgens laughs as he remembers. “I cringe when I think about how much work and how much time that first edition took me,” he says. “But we worked together, put in as much time as we needed, and we kept getting the next issue out. After a lot of trial and error, we got good at it.”
Shaking his head, Lutgens comments that learning by doing is a thorough, but sometimes, heartrending process.
“But I couldn’t let my dad down,” he recalls. “And I couldn’t see my community—my friends, neighbors, and role models—without a newspaper.”
Over the past three years, Lutgens and the newspaper staff have been creating the “new” normal that defines newspaper operations these days. “The other day I commented that the job seems to be getting easier,” he says. “Reed told me, of course it is, because I have been creating a system that helps things run more smoothly.” The “system” in question includes everything from bookkeeping to organizing the Star Eagle’s dozens of annual bound newspaper books to relocating furniture.
The reorganization coupled with the already demanding tasks of daily operation has been challenging. “Sometimes this job weighs on you,” he admits, mentioning that he is frequently in the office at midnight and later.
“But it’s a labor of love that I wouldn’t wish away.”
People are accustomed to seeing the weekly newspaper as a finished product that looks a certain way and includes certain expected information. “But they don’t realize it all started out as—nothing—like the blank canvas an artist begins with.
“It’s like a giant Tetris puzzle that has to be put together. But more than that: The ads, the news stories, the weekly features, they all have to be assembled first.”
One thing seems evident, though. As long as Lutgens remains in the publisher’s chair, the Star Eagle will be at the center of a network with a heart. “A week doesn’t go by without my hearing something that makes me smile,” he says, citing some of the charming stories and pictures that appear on his pages, along with compliments like “We have the best newspaper in Southern Minnesota.”
The pleasant moments are balanced by occasional criticism…but “balance” seems to be the overall winner. “Sometimes we get both vitriol and praise,” says Lutgens, recalling a few occasions when angry readers cancelled their subscriptions only to come back later and renew them. Or the elected officials who find cause both to complain and to praise, sometimes within the same story.
“If I were advising someone else on how to take over this newspaper,” Lutgens speculates, “I would tell them they have no idea what they’re getting themselves into.
“And then I would tell them they’re going to love what they do.”